Between The Dark And The Daylight by William Dean Howells

Its easy to link to paragraphs in the Full Text ArchiveIf this page contains some material that you want to link to but you don't want your visitors to have to scroll down the whole page just hover your mouse over the relevent paragraph and click the bookmark icon that appears to the left of it. The address of that paragraph will appear in the address bar of your browser. For further details about how you can link to the Full Text Archive please refer to our linking page.

[Illustration: THEIR JOINT STUDY OF HERDANCING-CARD DID NOT HELP THEM OUT]

BETWEEN THE DARKAND THE DAYLIGHT

Romances

BYW.D. HOWELLS1907

CONTENTS

CHAP.I. A SLEEP AND A FORGETTINGII. THE EIDOLONS OF BROOKS ALFORDIII. A MEMORY THAT WORKED OVERTIMEIV. A CASE OF METAPHANTASMIAV. EDITHAVI. BRAYBRIDGE'S OFFERVII. THE CHICK OF THE EASTER EGG

ILLUSTRATIONS

THEIR JOINT STUDY OF HER DANCING-CARD DID NOT HELP THEM OUT

A LIVELY MATRON, OF AS YOUTHFUL A TEMPERAMENT AS THE LIVELY GIRLS SHEBROUGHT IN HER TRAIN, BURST UPON THEM

"SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, AND SAID,... 'NOBODY HAS BEEN HERE, EXCEPT--'"

"NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY MARK"

"'YOU SHALL NOT SAY THAT!'"

"SHE GLARED AT EDITHA. 'WHAT YOU GOT THAT BLACK ON FOR?'"

I

A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING

I

Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo inthe interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, andwho wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter withan invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really carrytheir climate--always a bad one--with them, but she had set her mind onSan Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place makingthe observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.

His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French skybeyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round fora porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxiousfigure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderlyman expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down withumbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest themovements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing fromher arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench besidethe door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of hisappeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawnfrom the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if onsome quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.

In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentlemanglanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: "Are you an American?"

We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not tryto deny the fact.

"Oh, well, then," the stranger said, as if the fact made everythingright, "will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the dooryonder"--he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from underhis arm--"that I'll be with her as soon as I've looked after the trunks?Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, willyou?" He caught the sleeve of a _facchino_ who came wandering by, andheaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in thedirection of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situationwhich struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather thanexperience.

Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on thebench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil thathung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintlycharming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatrioticgrounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had gother veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from lookingat the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and methis dubious face with a smile.

"It _is_ beautiful, isn't it?" she said. "I know I shall get well, here,if they have such sunsets every day."

There was something so convincingly normal in her expression thatLanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. "I beg your pardon," he said."I am afraid there's some mistake. I haven't the pleasure--You mustexcuse me, but your father wished me to ask you to wait here for himtill he had got his baggage--"

"My father?" the girl stopped him with a sort of a frowning perplexityin the stare she gave him. "My father isn't here!"

"I beg your pardon," Lanfear said. "I must have misunderstood. Agentleman who got out of the train with you--a short, stout gentlemanwith gray hair--I understood him to say you were his daughter--requestedme to bring this message--"

The girl shook her head. "I don't know him. It must be a mistake."

"The mistake is mine, no doubt. It may have been some one else whom hepointed out, and I have blundered. I'm very sorry if I seem to haveintruded--"

"What place is this?" the girl asked, without noticing his excuses.

"San Remo," Lanfear answered. "If you didn't intend to stop here, yourtrain will be leaving in a moment."

"I meant to get off, I suppose," she said. "I don't believe I'm goingany farther." She leaned back against the bars of the bench, and put upone of her slim arms along the top.

There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of herperfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He hadno business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite theright to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, andapparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or couldhave been so in a country where any woman's defencelessness was not anyman's advantage. He could not go away without some effort to be of use.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "Can I help you in calling a carriage; orlooking after your hand-baggage--it will be getting dark--perhaps yourmaid--"

"My _maid_!" The girl frowned again, with a measure of the amazementwhich she showed when he mentioned her father. "_I_ have no maid!"

"Quite alone," she said, with a passivity in which there was noresentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of dignity.Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, she calledout joyfully: "Ah, there you are!" and Lanfear turned, and saw scufflingand heard puffing towards them the short, stout elderly gentleman whohad sent him to her. "I knew you would come before long!"

"Well, I thought it was pretty long, myself," the gentleman said, andthen he courteously referred himself to Lanfear. "I'm afraid thisgentleman has found it rather long, too; but I couldn't manage it amoment sooner."

Lanfear said: "Not at all. I wish I could have been of any use to--"

"My daughter--Miss Gerald, Mr.--"

"Lanfear--Dr. Lanfear," he said, accepting the introduction; and thegirl bowed.

"Oh, doctor, eh?" the father said, with a certain impression. "Going tostop here?"

"A few days," Lanfear answered, making way for the forward movementwhich the others began.

"Well, well! I'm very much obliged to you, very much, indeed; and I'msure my daughter is."

The girl said, "Oh yes, indeed," rather indifferently, and then as theypassed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned radiantly on him."Thank you, ever so much!" she said, with the gentle voice which he hadalready thought charming.

The father called back: "I hope we shall meet again. We are going to theSardegna."

Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed henow decided upon another hotel.

The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father wascarrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth init, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in thegirl's dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face,her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of somethingelse, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that which washumane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him in theother feeling. Unless she was out of her mind there was no way ofaccounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itselfscarcely short of insanity. She must have thought she knew him when heapproached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when hehad tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she deniedher father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her? Shehad known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not knownwhere she had stopped when she asked what place it was. She wasconsciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well undersunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she?

II

Lanfear's question persisted through the night, and it helped, with thecoughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of thehotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are withoutsomewhere a bronchial cough. If it is in the room next yours it keepsyou awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in yourvigils with that fact. Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poordinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee. He thought he hadlet a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and hewalked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gaymorning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the roughbeach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it. On his way hemet files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under theburdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden withwine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which thedonkeys drew. Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London,Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path. The skywas of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to him he could scoop itin his hand and pour it out again like water. Seaward, he glanced at thefishing-boats lying motionless in the offing, and the coastwise steamerthat runs between Nice and Genoa trailing a thin plume of smoke betweenhim and their white sails. With the more definite purpose of making sureof the Grand Hotel Sardegna, he scanned the different villa slopes thatshowed their level lines of white and yellow and dull pink through thegray tropical greenery on the different levels of the hills. He was dulyrewarded by the sight of the bold legend topping its cornice, and whenhe let his eye descend the garden to a little pavilion on the walloverlooking the road, he saw his acquaintances of the evening beforemaking a belated breakfast. The father recognized Lanfear first andspoke to his daughter, who looked up from her coffee and down towardshim where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He hadno reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbedfrom it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out overthe wall, and called down to him: "Won't you come up and join us,doctor?"

"Why, yes!" Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shakinghands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. Hehad in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat ofgreen-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as afriend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past orfuture time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as herfather's, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and tonewhich forbade misinterpretation.

"I was just talking about you, doctor," the father began, "and sayingwhat a pity you hadn't come to our hotel. It's a capital place."

"_I've_ been thinking it was a pity I went to mine," Lanfear returned,"though I'm in San Remo for such a short time it's scarcely worth whileto change."

"Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess we'rebooked for the winter, Nannie?" He referred the question to hisdaughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some coffee.

"I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I'm not sure it _was_coffee," Lanfear began, and he consented, with some demur, banal enough,about the trouble.

"Well, that's right, then, and no trouble at all," Mr. Gerald broke inupon him. "Here comes a fellow looking for a chance to bring you some,"and he called to a waiter wandering distractedly about with a "Heigh!"that might have been offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man."Can you get our friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this goodcoffee?" he asked, as the waiter approached.

"Miss Gerald," the father corrected him as he took the cards. "Why,hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are they?" he demanded of thewaiter. "Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on!I'd better go myself, Nannie, hadn't I? Of course! You get the crockery,waiter. Where did you say they were?" He bustled up from his chair,without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear inhurrying away. "You'll excuse me, doctor! I'll be back in half a minute.Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, ofcourse, but I don't believe they'll stay. Nannie, don't let Dr. Lanfearget away. I want to have some talk with him. You tell him he'd bettercome to the Sardegna, here."

Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt tofollow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves.She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and downon the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted thetranslucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across thepainted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had apathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced.She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.

"What strange things names are!" she said, as if musing on the fact,with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of herremark.

"They seem rather irrelevant at times," he admitted, with a smile."They're mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well asanother; they seem to belong equally to anybody."

"That is what I always say to myself," she agreed, with more interestthan he found explicable.

"But finally," he returned, "they're all that's left us, if they're leftthemselves. They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we everexisted. They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, oursoul."

She said, "That is very true," and then she suddenly gave him the cards."Do you know these people?"

"I? I thought they were friends of yours," he replied, astonished.

[Illustration: A LIVELY MATRON, OF AS YOUTHFUL A TEMPERAMENT AS THELIVELY GIRLS SHE BROUGHT IN HER TRAIN, BURST UPON THEM]

"That is what papa thinks," Miss Gerald said, and while she sat dreamilyabsent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices pierced from thesurrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as youthful atemperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst uponthem, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another until allfour had kissed her. She returned their greeting, and shared, in herquieter way, their raptures at their encounter.

"Such a hunt as we've had for you!" the matron shouted. "We've beenup-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady's chamber, all over the hotel.Where's your father? Ah, they did get our cards to you!" and by thattoken Lanfear knew that these ladies were the Bells. He had stood up ina sort of expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and ashadow of embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feelleast, though he fancied a sort of entreaty in the glance that she letpass over him.

Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfearout for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, andrecalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, anyof her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldestof them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimityto dance with her when she sat, in a little girl's forlorn despair ofbeing danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old OspreyHouse.

"Yes; and now," her mother followed, "we can't wait a moment longer, ifwe're to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls. We're not going to play,doctor," she made time to explain, "but we are going to look on. Willyou tell your father, dear," she said, taking the girl's handscaressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, "that wefound you, and did our best to find him? We can't wait now--our carriageis champing the bit at the foot of the stairs--but we're coming back ina week, and then we'll do our best to look you up again." She includedLanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the sameway, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanishedthrough the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and generalsound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.

Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing hadhappened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remainedon foot trying to piece together their interrupted tete-a-tete, but notsucceeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wipinghis forehead. "Have they been here, Nannie?" he asked. "I've beenfollowing them all over the place, and the _portier_ told me just nowthat he had seen a party of ladies coming down this way."

He got it all out, not so clearly as those women had got everything in,Lanfear reflected, but unmistakably enough as to the fact, and he lookedat his daughter as he repeated: "Haven't the Bells been here?"

[Illustration: "SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, AND SAID,... 'NOBODY HAS BEEN HERE,EXCEPT--'"]

She shook her head, and said, with her delicate quiet: "Nobody has beenhere, except--" She glanced at Lanfear, who smiled, but saw no openingfor himself in the strange situation. Then she said: "I think I will goand lie down a while, now, papa. I'm rather tired. Good-bye," she said,giving Lanfear her hand; it felt limp and cold; and then she turned toher father again. "Don't you come, papa! I can get back perfectly wellby myself. Stay with--"

"I will go with you," her father said, "and if Dr. Lanfear doesn't mindcoming--"

"Certainly I will come," Lanfear said, and he passed to the girl'sright; she had taken her father's arm; but he wished to offer moresupport if it were needed. When they had climbed to the open floweryspace before the hotel, she seemed aware of the groups of people about.She took her hand from her father's arm, as if unwilling to attracttheir notice by seeming to need its help, and swept up the gravelledpath between him and Lanfear, with her flowing walk.

Her father fell back, as they entered the hotel door, and murmured toLanfear: "Will you wait till I come down?" ... "I wanted to tell youabout my daughter," he explained, when he came back after the quarter ofan hour which Lanfear had found rather intense. "It's useless to pretendyou wouldn't have noticed--Had nobody been with you after I left you,down there?" He twisted his head in the direction of the pavilion, wherethey had been breakfasting.

"No _reason_, I'm afraid," Mr. Gerald said, and he broke out hopelessly:"She has her mind sound enough, but not--not her memory. She hadforgotten that they were there! Are you going to stay in San Remo?" heasked, with an effect of interrupting himself, as if in the wish to putoff something, or to make the ground sure before he went on.

"Why," Lanfear said, "I hadn't thought of it. I stopped--I was going toNice--to test the air for a friend who wishes to bring his invalid wifehere, if I approve--but I have just been asking myself why I should goto Nice when I could stay at San Remo. The place takes my fancy. I'msomething of an invalid myself--at least I'm on my vacation--and I finda charm in it, if nothing better. Perhaps a charm is enough. It used tobe, in primitive medicine."

He was talking to what he felt was not an undivided attention in Mr.Gerald, who said, "I'm glad of it," and then added: "I should like toconsult you professionally. I know your reputation in New York--thoughI'm not a New-Yorker myself--and I don't know any of the doctors here. Isuppose I've done rather a wild thing in coming off the way I have,with my daughter; but I felt that I must do something, and I hoped--Ifelt as if it were getting away from our trouble. It's most fortunate mymeeting you, if you can look into the case, and help me out with anurse, if she's needed, and all that!" To a certain hesitation inLanfear's face, he added: "Of course, I'm asking your professional help.My name is Abner Gerald--Abner L. Gerald--perhaps you know my standing,and that I'm able to--"

"Oh, it isn't a question of that! I shall be glad to do anything I can,"Lanfear said, with a little pang which he tried to keep silent inorienting himself anew towards the girl, whose loveliness he had feltbefore he had felt her piteousness.

"But before you go further I ought to say that you must have beenthinking of my uncle, the first Matthew Lanfear, when you spoke of myreputation; I haven't got any yet; I've only got my uncle's name."

"Oh!" Mr. Gerald said, disappointedly, but after a blank moment heapparently took courage. "You're in the same line, though?"

"If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an alienist,well, yes," Lanfear admitted.

"That's exactly what I mean," the elder said, with renewed hopefulness."I'm quite willing to risk myself with a man of the same name as Dr.Lanfear. I should like," he said, hurrying on, as if to override anyfurther reluctance of Lanfear's, "to tell you her story, and then--"

"By all means," Lanfear consented, and he put on an air of professionaldeference, while the older man began with a face set for the task.

"It's a long story, or it's a short story, as you choose to make it.We'll make it long, if necessary, later, but now I'll make it short.Five months ago my wife was killed before my daughter's eyes--"

He stopped; Lanfear breathed a gentle "Oh!" and Gerald blurted out:

"Accident--grade crossing--Don't!" he winced at the kindness inLanfear's eyes, and panted on. "That's over! What happened to _her_--tomy daughter--was that she fainted from the shock. When she woke--it wasmore like a sleep than a swoon--she didn't remember what had happened."Lanfear nodded, with a gravely interested face. "She didn't rememberanything that had ever happened before. She knew me, because I was therewith her; but she didn't know that she ever had a mother, because shewas not there with her. You see?"

"I can imagine," Lanfear assented.

"The whole of her life before the--accident was wiped out as to thefacts, as completely as if it had never been; and now every day, everyhour, every minute, as it passes, goes with that past. But herfaculties--"

"Yes?" Lanfear prompted in the pause which Mr. Gerald made.

"Her intellect--the working powers of her mind, apart from anything likeremembering, are as perfect as if she were in full possession of hermemory. I believe," the father said, with a pride that had its pathos,"no one can talk with her and not feel that she has a beautiful mind,that she can think better than most girls of her age. She reads, or shelets me read to her, and until it has time to fade, she appreciates itall more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I took her to the palaces forthe pictures, I saw that she had kept her feeling for art. When sheplays--you will hear her play--it is like composing the music forherself; she does not seem to remember the pieces, she seems toimprovise them. You understand?"

Lanfear said that he understood, for he could not disappoint theexpectation of the father's boastful love: all that was left him of theambitions he must once have had for his child.

The poor, little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began towalk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, andto say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thingagainst another: "The merciful thing is that she has been saved from thehorror and the sorrow. She knows no more of either than she knows of hermother's love for her. They were very much alike in looks and mind, andthey were always together more like persons of the same age--sisters, orgirl friends; but she has lost all knowledge of that, as of otherthings. And then there is the question whether she won't some time,sooner or later, come into both the horror and the sorrow." He stoppedand looked at Lanfear. "She has these sudden fits of drowsiness, whenshe _must_ sleep; and I never see her wake from them without beingafraid that she has wakened to everything--that she has got back intoher full self, and taken up the terrible burden that my old shouldersare used to. What do you think?"

Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answerfaithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. "That is achance we can't forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that thedrowsiness recurs periodically--"

"It doesn't," the father pleaded. "We don't know when it will come on."

"It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn't affect the possibleresult which you dread. I don't say that it is probable. But it's oneof the possibilities. It has," Lanfear added, "its logic."

"Ah, its logic!"

"Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her tohealth at any risk. So far as her mind is affected--"

"Her mind is not affected!" the father retorted.

"I beg your pardon--her memory--it might be restored with her physicalhealth. You understand that? It is a chance; it might or it might nothappen."

The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely facedbefore. "I suppose so," he faltered. After a moment he added, with morecourage: "You must do the best you can, at any risk."

Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if nothis words: "I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. It's veryinteresting, and--and--if you'll forgive me--very touching."

"Thank you."

"If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will--Do you suppose I could geta room in this hotel? I don't like mine."

"Why, I haven't any doubt you can. Shall we ask?"

III

It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience bypushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend's neurasthenicwife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more shelteredseat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. Hewrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation tohinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the casefirst in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a senseof effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case relatedto a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he triedto keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasurewhich, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strangeaffliction of a young and beautiful girl.

Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installednear her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him,without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardlydiffered from that of her father, except that it involved a closer andmore premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort ofassociation which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entailsno sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table,midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the oldtable-d'hote against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald hadan amiable old man's liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willinglyescaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of hisanxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during theseexcursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. Hethought it better that she should follow her father in his forays amongtheir neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with themas she might be brought into. He tried to guard her future encounterswith them, so that she should not show more than a young girl's usualdiffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of onepresence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.

A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first,returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests tosome others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She dancedmostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasingpopularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had alreadynoted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusiveas her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald's statement had beenthe large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking inthe particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, hermind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience wereunpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance sherepeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him,laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as herchaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts ina smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense ofpersonalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but nameswere nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nicethings to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not helpthem out.

Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of internationalscrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as Dr. Lanfear,but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured hercousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in thepeculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw inhim a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered thanthey thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with hisSpanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which wasthen already beginning to be rather belated.

Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the Englishhad any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about othergirls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by thisthey would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they hadapparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English ladiesher father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back toNew York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gayaffection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplementedby the easy social environment. If she did not look very well, she didnot differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed toconfide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, thatwas the way of all women patients.

Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo moreattractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they didnot return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were notseen again by the Geralds. Lanfear's friend with the invalid wife wrotefrom Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated him for thedisappointment, that she had found the air impossible in a single day,and they were off for Cannes. Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore,continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others,and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in thatpavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one,after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed theirclaim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the Decembersunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sightswhich the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenadebeyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the roadfrom the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of thesea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue asturquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath onthe left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, and in making itsclimb of the spacious arc between, shed a heat as great as that ofsummer, but not the heat of summer, on the pretty world of villas andhotels, towered over by the olive-gray slopes of the pine-clad heightsbehind and above them. From these tops a fine, keen cold fell with thewaning afternoon, which sharpened through the sunset till the dusk; butin the morning the change was from the chill to the glow, and they couldsit in their pavilion, under the willowy droop of the eucalyptus-treeswhich have brought the Southern Pacific to the Riviera, with increasingcomfort.

In the restlessness of an elderly man, Gerald sometimes left the youngpeople to their intolerable delays over their coffee, and walked offinto the little stone and stucco city below, or went and sat with hiscigar on one of the benches under the palm-lined promenade, which thepale northern consumptives shared with the swarthy peasant girls restingfrom their burdens, and the wrinkled grandmothers of their racepassively or actively begging from the strangers.

While she kept her father in sight it seemed that Miss Gerald couldmaintain her hold of his identity, and one morning she said, with thetender fondness for him which touched Lanfear: "When he sits there amongthose sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the world."

She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he said:"Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that their miserywas going on all the time, like some great natural process, day or dark,heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of it. Nothing,for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to us."

"Yes," she said, in her turn, "I have noticed that. But don't yousometimes--sometimes"--she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thoughtfrom escaping--"have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, orseeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?"

"Oh yes; that occurs to every one."

"But don't you--don't you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you hadknown them, in some previous existence--"

She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, theexperience which young people make much of when they have it, andsometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there couldbe no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:

"Ah, I don't believe it," the girl said. "They are too real for that.They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come morefully, some time. If there was a life before this--do you believe therewas?--they may be things that happened there. Or they may be things thatwill happen in a life after this. You believe in _that_, don't you?"

"In a life after this, or their happening in it?"

"Well, both."

Lanfear evaded her, partly. "They could be premonitions, prophecies, ofa future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life. Isuppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death."

"No." She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they hadbeen saying had already passed from her thought.

"But, Miss Gerald," Lanfear ventured, "have these impressions of yoursgrown more definite--fuller, as you say--of late?"

"My impressions?" She frowned at him, as if the look of interest, moreintense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her. "I don't know what youmean."

Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or not."A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I'm not always surethat we are right in treating the mental--for certainly they aremental--experiences of that time as altogether trivial, orinsignificant."

She seemed to understand now, and she protested: "But I don't meandreams. I mean things that really happened, or that really will happen."

"Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they painful things,or pleasant, mostly?"

She hesitated. "They are things that you know happen to other people,but you can't believe would ever happen to you."

"Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?"

"They are not dreams," she said, almost with vexation.

"Yes, yes, I understand," he hesitated to retrieve himself. "But _I_have had floating illusions, just before I fell asleep, or when I wassensible of not being quite awake, which seemed to differ from dreams.They were not so dramatic, but they were more pictorial; they were morevisual than the things in dreams."

"Yes," she assented. "They are something like that. But I should notcall them illusions."

"No. And they represent scenes, events?"

"You said yourself they were not dramatic."

"I meant, represent pictorially."

"No; they are like the landscape that flies back from your train ortowards it. I can't explain it," she ended, rising with what he felt adispleasure in his pursuit.

IV

He reported what had passed to her father when Mr. Gerald came back fromhis stroll into the town, with his hands full of English papers; Geraldhad even found a New York paper at the news-stand; and he listened withan apparent postponement of interest.

"I think," Lanfear said, "that she has some shadowy recollection, orrather that the facts come to her in a jarred, confused way--theelements of pictures, not pictures. But I am afraid that my inquiry hasoffended her."

"Merely her manner. And I don't know that anything is to be gained bysuch an inquiry."

"Perhaps not," Gerald allowed, with an inattention which vexed Lanfearin his turn.

The elderly man looked up, from where he sat provisionally in the hotelveranda, into Lanfear's face; Lanfear had remained standing. "_I_ don'tbelieve she's offended. Or she won't be long. One thing, she'll forgetit."

He was right enough, apparently. Miss Gerald came out of the hotel doortowards them, smiling equally for both, with the indefinable differencebetween cognition and recognition habitual in her look. She was dressedfor a walk, and she seemed to expect them to go with her. She beamedgently upon Lanfear; there was no trace of umbrage in her sunny gayety.Her face had, as always, its lurking pathos, but in its appeal toLanfear now there were only trust and the wish of pleasing him.

They started side by side for their walk, while her father drove besidethem in one of the little public carriages, mounting to the Berigo Road,through a street of the older San Remo, and issuing on a bare littlepiazza looking towards the walls and roofs of the mediaeval city,clustered together like cliff-dwellings, and down on the gardens thatfell from the villas and the hotels. A parapet kept the path on theroadside nearest the declivities, and from point to point benches wereput for the convenient enjoyment of the prospect. Mr. Gerald preferredto take his pleasure from the greater elevation of the seat in hisvictoria; his daughter and Lanfear leaned on the wall, and looked up tothe sky and out to the sea, both of the same blue.

The palms and eucalyptus-trees darkened about the villas; the bits ofvineyard, in their lingering crimson or lingering gold, and the orchardsof peaches and persimmons enriched with the varying reds of theirripening leaves and fruits the enchanting color scheme. The rose andgeranium hedges were in bloom; the feathery green of the pepper-treeswas warmed by the red-purple of their grape-like clusters of blossoms;the perfume of lemon flowers wandered vaguely upwards from some pointwhich they could not fix.

Nothing of all the beauty seemed lost upon the girl, so bereft that shecould enjoy no part of it from association. Lanfear observed that shewas not fatigued by any such effort as he was always helplessly makingto match what he saw with something he had seen before. Now, when thiseffort betrayed itself, she said, smiling: "How strange it is that yousee things for what they are like, and not for what they are!"

"Yes, it's a defect, I'm afraid, sometimes. Perhaps--"

"Perhaps what?" she prompted him in the pause he made.

"Nothing. I was wondering whether in some other possible life ourconsciousness would not be more independent of what we have been than itseems to be here." She looked askingly at him. "I mean whether thereshall not be something absolute in our existence, whether it shall notrealize itself more in each experience of the moment, and not be alwaysseeking to verify itself from the past."

"Isn't that what you think is the way with me already?" She turned uponhim smiling, and he perceived that in her New York version of a Parisiancostume, with her lace hat of summer make and texture and the vividparasol she twirled upon her shoulder, she was not only a very prettygirl, but a fashionable one. There was something touching in the fact,and a little bewildering. To the pretty girl, the fashionable girl, hecould have answered with a joke, but the stricken intelligence had aclaim to his seriousness. Now, especially, he noted what had from timeto time urged itself upon his perception. If the broken ties which oncebound her to the past were beginning to knit again, her recoveryotherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signallythe distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in whichthere was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which hadintimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of adisembodied spirit, possessed him, and brought, in its contradiction ofan accepted theory, a suggestion that was destined to become conviction.He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence ofpersonality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except throughmemory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they allpersisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through timewithout the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his ownpersonality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternitywithout that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?

Her waiting eyes recalled him from his inquiry, and with an effort heanswered, "Yes, I think you do have your being here and now, MissGerald, to an unusual degree."

"And you don't think that is wrong?"

"Wrong? Why? How?"

"Oh, I don't know." She looked round, and her eye fell upon her fatherwaiting for them in his carriage beside the walk. The sight supplied herwith the notion which Lanfear perceived would not have occurredotherwise. "Then why doesn't papa want me to remember things?"

She looked at him with entreaty. "Do you think it would make my fatherhappier if I did?"

"That I can't say," Lanfear answered. "People are often the sadder forwhat they remember. If I were your father--Excuse me! I don't meananything so absurd. But in his place--"

He stopped, and she said, as if she were satisfied with his brokenreply: "It is very curious. When I look at him--when I am with him--Iknow him; but when he is away, I don't remember him." She seemed ratherinterested in the fact than distressed by it; she even smiled.

"And me," he ventured, "is it the same with regard to me?"

She did not say; she asked, smiling: "Do you remember me when I amaway?"

"Yes!" he answered. "As perfectly as if you were with me. I can see you,hear you, feel the touch of your hand, your dress--Good heavens!" headded to himself under his breath. "What am I saying to this poorchild!"

In the instinct of escaping from himself he started forward, and shemoved with him. Mr. Gerald's watchful driver followed them with thecarriage.

"That is very strange," she said, lightly. "Is it so with you abouteveryone?"

"No," he replied, briefly, almost harshly. He asked, abruptly: "MissGerald, are there any times when you know people in their absence?"

"Just after I wake from a nap--yes. But it doesn't last. That is, itseems to me it doesn't. I'm not sure."

As they followed the winding of the pleasant way, with the villas on theslopes above and on the slopes below, she began to talk of them, and tocome into that knowledge of each which formed her remembrance of themfrom former knowledge of them, but which he knew would fade when shepassed them.

The next morning, when she came down unwontedly late to breakfast intheir pavilion, she called gayly:

"Dr. Lanfear! It _is_ Dr. Lanfear?"

"I should be sorry if it were not, since you seem to expect it, MissGerald."

"Oh, I just wanted to be sure. Hasn't my father been here, yet?" It wasthe first time she had shown herself aware of her father except in hispresence, as it was the first time she had named Lanfear to his face.

He suppressed a remote stir of anxiety, and answered: "He went to gethis newspapers; he wished you not to wait. I hope you slept well?"

"Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don't know why,exactly."

"We had rather a long walk."

"Did we have a walk yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Then it was _so_! I thought I had dreamed it. I was beginning toremember something, and my father asked me what it was, and then Icouldn't remember. Do you believe I shall keep on remembering?"

"I don't see why you shouldn't."

"Should you wish me to?" she asked, in evident, however unconscious,recurrence to their talk of the day before.

"Why not?"

She sighed. "I don't know. If it's like some of those dreams or gleams.Is remembering pleasant?"

Lanfear thought for a moment. Then he said, in the honesty he thoughtbest to use with her: "For the most part I should say it was painful.Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, whatremains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate. I don't know why we shouldremember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we do, andnot recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely andrightly." He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a little. "Idon't mean that we _can't_ recall those times. We can and do, to consoleand encourage ourselves; but they don't recur, without our willing, asthe others do."

She had poured herself a cup of coffee, and she played with the spoon inher saucer while she seemed to listen. But she could not have beenlistening, for when she put down her spoon and leaned back in her chair,she said: "In those dreams the things come from such a very far wayback, and they don't belong to a life that is like this. They belong toa life like what you hear the life after this is. We are the same as weare here; but the things are different. We haven't the same rules, thesame wishes--I can't explain."

"You mean that we are differently conditioned?"

"Yes. And if you can understand, I feel as if I remembered long back ofthis, and long forward of this. But one can't remember forward!"

"That wouldn't be remembrance; no, it would be prescience; and yourconsciousness here, as you were saying yesterday, is through knowing,not remembering."

She stared at him. "Was that yesterday? I thought it was--to-morrow."She rubbed her hand across her forehead as people do when they wish toclear their minds. Then she sighed deeply. "It tires me so. And yet Ican't help trying." A light broke over her face at the sound of a stepon the gravel walk near by, and she said, laughing, without lookinground: "That is papa! I knew it was his step."

V

Such return of memory as she now had was like memory in what we call thelower lives. It increased, fluctuantly, with an ebb in which it almostdisappeared, but with a flow that in its advance carried it beyond itslast flood-tide mark. After the first triumph in which she could addressLanfear by his name, and could greet her father as her father, therewere lapses in which she knew them as before, without naming them.Except mechanically to repeat the names of other people when reminded ofthem, she did not pass beyond cognition to recognition. Events stillleft no trace upon her; or if they did she was not sure whether theywere things she had dreamed or experienced. But her memory grew strongerin the region where the bird knows its way home to the nest, or the beeto the hive. She had an unerring instinct for places where she had oncebeen, and she found her way to them again without the help from theassociation which sometimes failed Lanfear. Their walks were alwaystaken with her father's company in his carriage, but they sometimes lefthim at a point of the Berigo Road, and after a long detour among thevineyards and olive orchards of the heights above, rejoined him atanother point they had agreed upon with him. One afternoon, when Lanfearhad climbed the rough pave of the footways with her to one of thesummits, they stopped to rest on the wall of a terrace, where they satwatching the changing light on the sea, through a break in the trees.The shadows surprised them on their height, and they had to make theirway among them over the farm paths and by the dry beds of the torrentsto the carriage road far below. They had been that walk only oncebefore, and Lanfear failed of his reckoning, except the downward coursewhich must bring them out on the high-road at last. But Miss Gerald'sinstinct saved them where his reason failed. She did not remember, butshe knew the way, and she led him on as if she were inventing it, or asif it had been indelibly traced upon her mind and she had only to followthe mystical lines within to be sure of her course. She confessed tobeing very tired, and each step must have increased her fatigue, buteach step seemed to clear her perception of the next to be taken.

Suddenly, when Lanfear was blaming himself for bringing all this uponher, and then for trusting to her guidance, he recognized a certainpeasant's house, and in a few moments they had descended theolive-orchard terraces to a broken cistern in the clear twilight beyondthe dusk. She suddenly halted him. "There, there! It happenedthen--now--this instant!"

"What?"

"That feeling of being here before! There is the curb of the oldcistern; and the place where the terrace wall is broken; and the path upto the vineyard--Don't you feel it, too?" she demanded, with ajoyousness which had no pleasure for him.

"Yes, certainly. We were here last week. We went up the path to thefarm-house to get some water."

A sound of wheels in the road ceased, and her father's voice called:"Don't you want to take my place, and let me walk awhile, Nannie?"

"No. You come to me, papa. Something very strange has happened;something you will be surprised at. Hurry!" She seemed to be joking, ashe was, while she beckoned him impatiently towards her.

He had left his carriage, and he came up with a heavy man's quickenedpace. "Well, what is the wonderful thing?" he panted out.

She stared blankly at him, without replying, and they silently madetheir way to Mr. Gerald's carriage.

"I lost the way, and Miss Gerald found it," Lanfear explained, as hehelped her to the place beside her father.

She said nothing, and almost with sinking into the seat, she sank intothat deep slumber which from time to time overtook her.

"I didn't know we had gone so far--or rather that we had waited so longbefore we started down the hills," Lanfear apologized in an involuntarywhisper.

"Oh, it's all right," her father said, trying to adjust the girl'sfallen head to his shoulder. "Get in and help me--"

Lanfear obeyed, and lent a physician's skilled aid, which left thecumbrous efforts of her father to the blame he freely bestowed on them."You'll have to come here on the other side," he said. "There's roomenough for all three. Or, hold on! Let me take your place." He took theplace in front, and left her to Lanfear's care, with the trust which wasthe physician's right, and with a sense of the girl's dependence inwhich she was still a child to him.

They did not speak till well on the way home. Then the father leanedforward and whispered huskily: "Do you think she's as strong as shewas?"

Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over. He murmured back: "No.She's better. She's not so strong."

"Yes," the father murmured. "I understand."

What Gerald understood by Lanfear's words might not have been theirmeaning, but what Lanfear meant was that there was now an interfusion ofthe past and present in her daily experience. She still did notremember, but she had moments in which she hovered upon such knowledgeof what had happened as she had of actual events. When she was strongershe seemed farther from this knowledge; when she was weaker she wasnearer it. So it seemed to him in that region where he could be sure ofhis own duty when he looked upon it singly as concern for her health. Noinquiry for the psychological possibilities must be suffered to dividehis effort for her physical recovery, though there might come with thisa cessation of the timeless dream-state in which she had her being, andshe might sharply realize the past, as the anaesthete realizes hisreturn to agony from insensibility. The quality of her mind was asdifferent from the thing called culture as her manner from convention. Asimplicity beyond the simplicity of childhood was one with a poeticcolor in her absolute ideas. But this must cease with her restoration tothe strength in which she could alone come into full and clearself-consciousness. So far as Lanfear could give reality to hisoccupation with her disability, he was ministering to a mind diseased;not to "rase out its written trouble," but if possible to restore theobliterated record, and enable her to spell its tragic characters. If hecould, he would have shrunk from this office; but all the more becausehe specially had to do with the mystical side of medicine, he alwaystried to keep his relation to her free from personal feeling, and hisaim single and matter-of-fact.

It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the verytopographical and meteorological environment. The autumn was a longdelight in which the constant sea, the constant sky, knew almost aslittle variance as the unchanging Alps. The days passed in a processionof sunny splendor, neither hot nor cold, nor of the temper of anydeterminate season, unless it were an abiding spring-time. The flowersbloomed, and the grass kept green in a reverie of May. But one afternoonof January, while Lanfear was going about in a thin coat and panama hat,a soft, fresh wind began to blow from the east. It increased tillsunset, and then fell. In the morning he looked out on a world in whichthe spring had stiffened overnight into winter. A thick frost paintedthe leaves and flowers; icicles hung from pipes and vents; the frozenstreams flashed back from their arrested flow the sun as it shone fromthe cold heaven, and blighted and blackened the hedges of geranium androse, the borders of heliotrope, the fields of pinks. The leaves of thebananas hung limp about their stems; the palms rattled like skeletons inthe wind when it began to blow again over the shrunken landscape.

VI

The caprice of a climate which vaunted itself perpetual summer was agodsend to all the strangers strong enough to bear it without suffering.For the sick an indoor life of huddling about the ineffectual fires ofthe south began, and lasted for the fortnight that elapsed before theRiviera got back its advertised temperature. Miss Gerald had drooped inthe milder weather; but the cold braced and lifted her, and with itshelp she now pushed her walks farther, and was eager every day for someexcursion to the little towns that whitened along the shores, or thevillages that glimmered from the olive-orchards of the hills. Once shesaid to Lanfear, when they were climbing through the brisk, clear air:"It seems to me as if I had been here before. Have I?"

"No. This is the first time."

She said no more, but seemed disappointed in his answer, and hesuggested: "Perhaps it is the cold that reminds you of our winters athome, and makes you feel that the scene is familiar."

"Yes, that is it!" she returned, joyously. "Was there snow, there, likethat on the mountains yonder?"

"A good deal more, I fancy. That will be gone in a few days, and athome, you know, our snow lasts for weeks."

"Then that is what I was thinking of," she said, and she ran stronglyand lightly forward. "Come!"

When the harsh weather passed and the mild climate returned there was nolapse of her strength. A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began toflush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like thatof the lengthening days dawned in her eyes. She had an instinct for theearliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to hearthe blackcaps singing in the garden-tops; and nothing that was novel inher experience seemed alien to it. This was the sum of what Lanfear gotby the questioning which he needlessly tried to keep indirect. She knewthat she was his patient, and in what manner, and she had let him divinethat her loss of memory was suffering as well as deprivation. She hadnot merely the fatigue which we all undergo from the effort to recallthings, and which sometimes reaches exhaustion; but there was apparentlyin the void of her oblivion a perpetual rumor of events, names,sensations, like--Lanfear felt that he inadequately conjectured--thesubjective noises which are always in the ears of the deaf. Sometimes,in the distress of it, she turned to him for help, and when he was ableto guess what she was striving for, a radiant relief and gratitudetransfigured her face. But this could not last, and he learned to notehow soon the stress and tension of her effort returned. His compassionfor her at such times involved a temptation, or rather a question, whichhe had to silence by a direct effort of his will. Would it be worse,would it be greater anguish for her to know at once the past that nowtormented her consciousness with its broken and meaninglessreverberations? Then he realized that it was impossible to help her eventhrough the hazard of telling her what had befallen; that no such effectas was to be desired could be anticipated from the outside.

If he turned to her father for counsel or instruction, or even aparticipation in his responsibility, he was met by an optimisticpatience which exasperated him, if it did not complicate the case. Once,when Lanfear forbearingly tried to share with him his anxiety for theeffect of a successful event, he was formed to be outright, and remindhim, in so many words, that the girl's restoration might be throughanguish which he could not measure.

"How do you expect me to prevent it?" Lanfear demanded, in his vexation.

Gerald caught his breath. "If she gets well, she will remember?"

"I don't say that. It seems probable. Do you wish her being to remainbereft of one-half its powers?"

"Oh, how do I know what I want?" the poor man groaned. "I only know thatI trust you entirely, Doctor Lanfear. Whatever you think best will bebest and wisest, no matter what the outcome is."

He got away from Lanfear with these hopeless words, and again Lanfearperceived that the case was left wholly to him. His consolation was thecharm of the girl's companionship, the delight of a nature knowingitself from moment to moment as if newly created. For her, as nearly ashe could put the fact into words, the actual moment contained the pastand the future as well as the present. When he saw in her thepersistence of an exquisite personality independent of the means bywhich he realized his own continuous identity, he sometimes felt as ifin the presence of some angel so long freed from earthly allegiance thatit had left all record behind, as we leave here the records of our firstyears. If an echo of the past reached her, it was apt to be trivial andinsignificant, like those unimportant experiences of our remotestchildhood, which remain to us from a world outlived.

It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself inthese celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic immortality,if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at the cost ofone-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that she sawpleased him more than another, there was a responsive pleasure in hereyes, which he could have called vanity if he would; and she had attimes a wilfulness which he could have accused of being obstinacy. Sheshowed a certain jealousy of any experiences of his apart from her own,not because they included others, but because they excluded her. He wasaware of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave hismotives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioningshe could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time theunconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which thechild has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish toplease existed as perfectly as in the ignorance of childhood.

This, so far as he could ever put into words, was the interior of theworld where he dwelt apart with her. Its exterior continued very likethat of other worlds where two young people have their being. Now andthen a more transitory guest at the Grand Hotel Sardegna perhaps fanciedit the iridescent orb which takes the color of the morning sky, and isdestined, in the course of nature, to the danger of collapse in whichplanetary space abounds. Some rumor of this could not fail to reachLanfear, but he ignored it as best he could in always speaking gravelyof Miss Gerald as his patient, and authoritatively treating her as such.He convinced some of these witnesses against their senses; for theothers, he felt that it mattered little what they thought, since, if itreached her, it could not pierce her isolation for more than the instantin which the impression from absent things remained to her.

A more positive embarrassment, of a kind Lanfear was not prepared for,beset him in an incident which would have been more touching if he hadbeen less singly concerned for the girl. A pretty English boy, with thedawn of a peachy bloom on his young cheeks, and an impulsivenesscommoner with English youth than our own, talked with Miss Gerald oneevening and the next day sent her an armful of flowers with his card. Hefollowed this attention with a call at her father's apartment, and afterMiss Gerald seemed to know him, and they had, as he told Lanfear, adelightful time together, she took up his card from the table where itwas lying, and asked him if he could tell her who that gentleman was.The poor fellow's inference was that she was making fun of him, and hecame to Lanfear, as an obvious friend of the family, for an explanation.He reported the incident, with indignant tears standing in his eyes:"What did she mean by it? If she took my flowers, she must have knownthat--that--they--And to pretend to forget my name! Oh, I say, it's toobad! She could have got rid of me without that. Girls have ways enough,you know."

"Do you mean that she's out of her mind? She can talk as well as anyone--better!"

"No, not that. But she's often in pain--greatly in pain when she can'trecall a name, and I've no doubt she was trying to recall yours with thehelp of your card. She would be the last in the world to be indifferentto your feelings. I imagine she scarcely knew what she was doing at themoment."

"Then, do you think--do you suppose--it would be any good my trying tosee her again? If she wouldn't be indifferent to my feelings, do youthink there would be any hope--Really, you know, I would give anythingto believe that my feelings wouldn't offend her. You understand me?"

"Perhaps I do."

"I've never met a more charming girl and--she isn't engaged, is she? Sheisn't engaged to you? I don't mean to press the question, but it's aquestion of life and death with me, you know."

Lanfear thought he saw his way out of the coil. "I can tell you, quiteas frankly as you ask, that Miss Gerald isn't engaged to _me_."

"Oh, here's the doctor, now," a voice said behind them where they stoodby the garden wall, and they turned to confront Gerald with hisdaughter.

"Why! Are you going?" she said to the Englishman, and she put out herhand to him.

"Yes, Mr. Evers is going." Lanfear came to the rescue.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the girl said, and the youth responded.

"That's very good of you. I--good-by! I hope you'll be very happy--I--"He turned abruptly away, and ran into the hotel.

"What has he been crying for?" Miss Gerald asked, turning from a longlook after him.

Lanfear did not know quite what to say; but he hazarded saying: "He washurt that you had forgotten him when he came to see you this afternoon."

"Did he come to see me?" she asked; and Lanfear exchanged looks ofanxiety, pain, and reassurance with her father. "I am so sorry. Shall Igo after him and tell him?"

"No; I explained; he's all right," Lanfear said.

"You want to be careful, Nannie," her father added, "about people'sfeelings when you meet them, and afterwards seem not to know them."

"But I _do_ know them, papa," she remonstrated.

"You want to be careful," her father repeated.

"I will--I will, indeed." Her lips quivered, and the tears came, whichLanfear had to keep from flowing by what quick turn he could give tosomething else.

An obscure sense of the painful incident must have lingered with herafter its memory had perished. One afternoon when Lanfear and her fatherwent with her to the military concert in the sycamore-planted piazzanear the Vacherie Suisse, where they often came for a cup of tea, shestartled them by bowing gayly to a young lieutenant of engineersstanding there with some other officers, and making the most of theprospect of pretty foreigners which the place afforded. The lieutenantreturned the bow with interest, and his eyes did not leave their partyas long as they remained. Within the bounds of deference for her, it wasevident that his comrades were joking about the honor done him by thischarming girl. When the Geralds started homeward Lanfear was aware of atrio of officers following them, not conspicuously, but unmistakably;and after that, he could not start on his walks with Miss Gerald and herfather without the sense that the young lieutenant was hoveringsomewhere in their path, waiting in the hopes of another bow from her.The officer was apparently not discouraged by his failure to winrecognition from her, and what was amounting to annoyance for Lanfearreached the point where he felt he must share it with her father. He hadnearly as much trouble in imparting it to him as he might have had withMiss Gerald herself. He managed, but when he required her father to puta stop to it he perceived that Gerald was as helpless as she would havebeen. He first wished to verify the fact from its beginning with her,but this was not easy.

"Nannie," he said, "why did you bow to that officer the other day?"

"What officer, papa? When?"

"You know; there by the band-stand, at the Swiss Dairy."

She stared blankly at him, and it was clear that it was all as if it hadnot been with her. He insisted, and then she said: "Perhaps I thought Iknew him, and was afraid I should hurt his feelings if I didn'trecognize him. But I don't remember it at all." The curves of her mouthdrooped, and her eyes grieved, so that her father had not the heart tosay more. She left them, and when he was alone with Lanfear he said:

"You see how it is!"

"Yes, I saw how it was before. But what do you wish to do?"

"Do you mean that he will keep it up?"

"Decidedly, he'll keep it up. He has every right to from his point ofview."

"I?" said Lanfear, indignantly; but his vexation was not so great thathe did not feel a certain pleasure in fulfilling this strangest part ofhis professional duty, when at the beginning of their next excursion heput Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to thepoint at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their fartherprogress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded invery blunt Italian: "What do you want?"

The lieutenant stared him over with potential offence, in which hisdelicately pencilled mustache took the shape of a light sneer, anddemanded in his turn, in English much better than Lanfear's Italian:"What right have you to ask?"

"The right of Miss Gerald's physician. She is an invalid in my charge."

A change quite indefinable except as the visible transition from coxcombto gentleman passed over the young lieutenant's comely face. "Aninvalid?" he faltered.

"Yes," Lanfear began; and then, with a rush of confidence which thechange in the officer's face justified, "one very strangely, verytragically afflicted. Since she saw her mother killed in an accident ayear ago she remembers nothing. She bowed to you because she saw youlooking at her, and supposed you must be an acquaintance. May I assureyou that you are altogether mistaken?"

The lieutenant brought his heels together, and bent low. "I beg herpardon with all my heart. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything Ican. I would like to stop that. May I bring my mother to call on MissGerald?"

He offered his hand, and Lanfear wrung it hard, a lump of gratitude inhis throat choking any particular utterance, while a fine shame for hislate hostile intention covered him.

When the lieutenant came, with all possible circumstance, bringing thecountess, his mother, Mr. Gerald overwhelmed them with hospitality ofevery form. The Italian lady responded effusively, and more sincerelycooed and murmured her compassionate interest in his daughter. Then allparted the best of friends; but when it was over, Miss Gerald did notknow what it had been about. She had not remembered the lieutenant orher father's vexation, or any phase of the incident which was nowclosed. Nothing remained of it but the lieutenant's right, which hegravely exercised, of saluting them respectfully whenever he met them.

VII

Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call fromMiss Gerald's father, especially during the daytime slumbers into whichshe fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. But asthe days went on and the event continued the same he allowed himselfgreater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives together,but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief fromthe stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bondwhich enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore attimes for mere self-preservation's sake; but there was always a lurkinganxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him,shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.

One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware ofsomewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursionto a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandonedhimself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to aluxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allowhimself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of asharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Geraldwas tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met himwith an easy smile. "She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasantdream. Now she's off again. Do you think we'd better wake her fordinner? I suppose she's getting up her strength in this way. Hersleeping so much is a good symptom, isn't it?"

Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possibleeventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms tofavor. But he said: "Decidedly I wouldn't wake her"; and he spent anight of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which themorning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with afresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father's "Well, Nannie,you _have_ had a nap, this time," she answered, smiling:

"Have I? It isn't afternoon, is it?"

"No, it's morning. You've napped it all night."

She said: "I can't tell whether I've been asleep or not, sometimes; butnow I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we goingto-day?"

She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: "I guess the doctorwon't want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterdayafternoon."

"Ah," she said, "I _knew_ you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Areyou too tired?"

"It was rather far, but I'm not tired. I shouldn't advise Possana,though."

"Possana?" she repeated. "What is Possana?"

He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an accountof his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, inmaking light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end shesaid, gently: "Shall we go this morning?"

"Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie," her father interrupted,whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to herwill. "Or if you won't let _him_, let _me_. I don't want to go anywherethis morning."

Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that bythe afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in hersigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returningdrowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested:"There's plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; andwe can get the sunset from the hills."

"Yes, that will be nice," she said, but he perceived that she did notassent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readinesswith which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon. Sheclearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned toLanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join herfather in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage which hadbecome conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herselfat the hotel door, and they set out.

When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatterthrough the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed tofeel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on onehand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high,dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from thecommonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white andsaffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay under villawalls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finallyalong a stretch of the old Cornice road.

"But this," she said, at a certain point, "is where we were yesterday!"

"This is where the doctor was yesterday," her father said, behind hiscigar.

"And wasn't I with you?" she asked Lanfear.

He said, playfully: "To-day you are. I mustn't be selfish and have youevery day."

"Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday."

Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.

They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on theshoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed,and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people hadbuilt when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.

World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but thespring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses ofgreen and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages,was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olivesthickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valleynarrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawingmysteriously together in the distances.

"I think we've got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald," Lanfear brokethe common silence by saying. "You couldn't see much more of Possanaafter you got there."

"Besides," her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the youngerman, "if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won't want tomake the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!"

"Oh no," she said, "I can't give it up."

"Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?"

Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at thefoot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of thepeasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but hesuggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the newtown.

"Well, I hope so," Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana Nuova nosaddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the cafe where theystopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people togo on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. Inthe meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazzabefore the cafe, appeared to have engaged the energies of the malepopulation. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwartpeasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which theycould have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, butthere was a pad on which the young lady could ride.

They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which thedonkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the peasantgirl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in thepoints they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscapeopened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpineheights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines.On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there;closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.

It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and Lanfearwondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by hiscompanion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silencebroken only by the picking of the donkey's hoofs on the rude mosaic ofthe pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its heels. On thetop of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, and MissGerald asked abruptly: "Why were you so sad?"

"When was I sad?" he asked, in turn.

"I don't know. Weren't you sad?"

"When I was here yesterday, you mean?" She smiled on his fortunateguess, and he said: "Oh, I don't know. It might have begun withthinking--

'Of old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago.'

You know the pirates used to come sailing over the peaceful sea yonderfrom Africa, to harry these coasts, and carry off as many as they couldcapture into slavery in Tunis and Algiers. It was a long, dumb kind ofmisery that scarcely made an echo in history, but it haunted my fancyyesterday, and I saw these valleys full of the flight and the pursuitwhich used to fill them, up to the walls of the villages, perched on theheights where men could have built only for safety. Then, I got tothinking of other things--"

"And thinking of things in the past always makes you sad," she said, inpensive reflection. "If it were not for the wearying of always trying toremember, I don't believe I should want my memory back. And of course tobe like other people," she ended with a sigh.

It was on his tongue to say that he would not have her so; but hechecked himself, and said, lamely enough: "Perhaps you will be likethem, sometime."

She startled him by answering irrelevantly: "You know my mother is dead.She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very little."

She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew abreath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: "Whatmade you think I was sad yesterday?"

"Oh, I knew, somehow. I think that I always know when you are sad; Ican't tell you how, but I feel it."

"Then I must cheer up," Lanfear said. "If I could only see you strongand well, Miss Gerald, like this girl--"

They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with theirsmiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not mind.

"But you will be--you will be! We must hurry on, now, or your fatherwill be getting anxious."

They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than ithad been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more toreveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw aman coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively puthimself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowningdarkly, and muttering and gesticulating.

Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. Thepeasant girl said gayly in Italian: "He is mad; the earthquake made himmad," and urged the donkey forward.

Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself theluxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of themadman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longerexperienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, andmade him glad of any delay that kept them from it.

They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the opencountry without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin,which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, tillwithin the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, asthey had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing tointimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been themain thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from ithere and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the littlepiazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simpletown house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered facades.The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and somewere tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of thechurches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it wasroofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people hadflocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altarstood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubsperched, under the open sky, in celestial security.

He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he couldnot have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable ofthe emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made sure ofsaying: "The earthquake, you know," and she responded with compassion:

"Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, whenit happened. How strange it must all have seemed to them, here wherethey lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing couldhappen to others, but not to them. That is the way!"

It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of theknowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like asleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him inwaking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading orhearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could beso. It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way ofwhich he had more than once been sensible, and making use of hismemory. From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew thatthis was as the blind speak of seeing.

He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they hadleft the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey. She was not there, andafter trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear decidedto take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to thechance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search forthe street: he came out again and again at the point he had startedfrom.

"What is the matter?" she asked at the annoyance he could not keep outof his face.

He laughed. "Oh, merely that we're lost. But we will wait here till thatgirl chooses to come back for us. Only it's getting late, and Mr.Gerald--"

"Why, I know the way down," she said, and started quickly in a directionwhich, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he hademerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of hismemory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand forguidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directeda pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In somemystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.

They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond thelast house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into thechurch with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her andwait for them there.

"Does no one at all live here?" Lanfear asked, carelessly.

"Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for alemonade! My mother," she went on, with a natural pride in the event,"was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast,and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away." She vividlydramatized the fact. "I was alive, but she was dead."

"Tell her," Miss Gerald said, "that my mother is dead, too."

"Ah, poor little thing!" the girl said, when the message was delivered,and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in thebond of their common orphanhood.

The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it hadtaken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and thetwilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them insight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burstupon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They sawa boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling withanother, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towardsthe side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorgebelow.

The donkey-girl called out: "Oh, the madman! He is killing the signor!"

Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fledshrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear ashe ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but withina few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: "Oh,my mother is killed!" and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in aswoon.

"No, no; it's all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I'm not hurt.I let myself go in that fellow's hands, and I fell softly. It was agood thing he didn't drop me over the edge." Gerald gathered himself upnimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situationexplained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effectthat he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for aguide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him.While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl's pulse, and now and thenputting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: "You'rebleeding, Mr. Gerald," he said.

"So I am," the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream fromhis face with his handkerchief. "But I am not hurt--"

"Better let me tie it up," Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief fromhim. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not alwaysthought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with areverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl hadnot ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care wasneeded in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part ofthe silence in which the procession made its way slowly into PossanaNuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to supporthis daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the wholepopulation awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they hadhalted before, and which now had the distinction of offering themshelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who stillremained in her swoon.

When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomento disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customersindoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quietas he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the publicphysician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear thatnothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experienceof the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some SanRemo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and thenGerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not somuch for his daughter's recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt,as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.

It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into hischair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with abloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness,like a kindly brigand.

Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, whiteand still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor manfilled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical forhim. "Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald," he said. "Your waking can do no good. Iwill keep watch, and if need be, I'll call you. Try to make yourselfeasy on that couch."

"I shall not sleep," the old man answered. "How could I?" Nevertheless,he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had beensitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start."I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did Igroan? Is there any change?"

Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, whichthrew a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After amoment he asked: "How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted afterthe accident to her mother?"

"I don't think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then sheremembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her rememberingnow?"

"I don't know. But there's a kind of psychopathic logic--If she lost hermemory through one great shock, she might find it through another."

"Yes, yes!" the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in hisanguish. "That was what I thought--what I was afraid of. If I could diemyself, and save her from living through it--I don't know what I'msaying! But if--but if--if she could somehow be kept from it a littlelonger! But she can't, she can't! She must know it now when she wakes."

Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl's slim wrist quietlybetween his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.

"I suppose it's been a sort of weakness--a sort of wickedness--in me towish to keep it from her; but I _have_ wished that, doctor; you musthave seen it, and I can't deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us inthis world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost herhalf her being, I know it; but it hasn't cost her her reason, and I'mafraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you mustdo--But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!"

He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He madean appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovablewith his hand on the girl's pulse.

"Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, thoughwithout it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do youthink my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her--Butthis faint _may_ pass and she may wake from it just as she has been. Itis logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?"

A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like aresponse from the girl's lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred.Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. He made asudden clutch at the girl's wrist with the hand that had not left it andthen remained motionless. "She will never remember now--here."

He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. "Oh, my dearest!My poor girl! My love!" still keeping her wrist in his hand, and layinghis head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: "Thepulse!" and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, andlistened with bursts of: "It's beating! She isn't dead! She's alive!"Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that sheopened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:

"My father! Where is he?"

A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which theywelcomed her back to life. She took her father's head between her hands,and kissed his bruised face. "I thought you were dead; and I thoughtthat mamma--" She stopped, and they waited breathless. "But that waslong ago, wasn't it?"

"Yes," her father eagerly assented. "Very long ago."

"I remember," she sighed. "I thought that I was killed, too. Was it_all_ a dream?" Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Whichshould speak? "This is Doctor Lanfear, isn't it?" she asked, with a dimsmile. "And I'm not dreaming now, am I?" He had released her from hisarms, but she held his hand fast. "I know it is you, and papa; and yes,I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It'sbeautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted tocall to you. But mamma--"

However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, ithad been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in therapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words toestablish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to thethings of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and soback to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no suddenburst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which herspirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to himthat the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies suchas, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of thoselately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed oftheir earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them outof an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was asif this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered herouter remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, itwas already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with theresignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.

Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alonehelped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyondit. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, morethan the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if notneglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not helpignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in theself-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing,he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he didnot do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt hisduty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived towitness his daughter's perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her;he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wifeof the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her.He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fondmemories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by heraffliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitenedinto summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glarebehind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon throughthe heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had beenfull of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place inNew England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morninghe did not wake.

"He gave his life that I might have mine!" she lamented in the firstwild grief.

"No, don't say that, Nannie," her husband protested, calling her by thepet name which her father always used. "He is dead; but if we owe eachother to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gavehimself."

"Oh, I know, I know!" she wailed. "But he would gladly have givenhimself for me."

That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to doso. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did notbelie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremeswithin which she means to rest her soul.

II

THE EIDOLONS OF BROOKS ALFORD

I should like to give the story of Alford's experiences just as Wanhope